ined some
acquaintance with German philosophy and with Vico. And in this work of
his advanced age he accepts the idea of Progress, so far as it could be
accepted by an orthodox son of the Church. He believes that the advance
of knowledge will lead to social progress, and that society, if it seems
sometimes to move backward, is always really moving forward. Bossuet,
for whom he had no word of criticism thirty years before, he now
convicts of "an imposing error." That great man, he writes, "has
confined historical events in a circle as rigorous as his genius. He has
imprisoned them in an inflexible Christianity--a terrible hoop in which
the human race would turn in a sort of eternity, without progress or
improvement." The admission from such a quarter shows eloquently how the
wind was setting.

The notions of development and continuity which were to control all
departments of historical study in the later nineteenth century were
at the same time being independently promoted by the young historical
school in Germany which is associated with the names of Eichhorn,
Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and institutions are a
natural growth or the expression of a people's mind, represents another
departure from the ideas of the eighteenth century. It was a repudiation
of that "universal reason" which desired to reform the world and its
peoples indiscriminately without taking any account of their national
histories.

CHAPTER XV. THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS:

I. SAINT-SIMON

Amid the intellectual movements in France described in the last chapter
the idea of Progress passed into a new phase of its growth. Hitherto it
had been a vague optimistic doctrine which encouraged the idealism of
reformers and revolutionaries, but could not guide them. It had waited
like a handmaid on the abstractions of Nature and Reason; it had hardly
realised an independent life. The time had come for systematic attempts
to probe its meaning and definitely to ascertain the direction in which
humanity is moving. Kant had said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed
to find the law of the movement of civilisation. Several Frenchmen
now undertook to solve the problem. They did not solve it; but the
new science of sociology was founded; and the idea of Progress, which
presided at its birth, has been its principal problem ever since.

1.

The three thinkers who claimed to have discovered the secret of social
development had also in view th